'The Great Hack' official trailer

Mine can tell you where I live, what I do for work, who my friends are, what my hobbies are, my insecurities, relationship status, political views and that I enjoy the sunset from my balcony. A lot.

I’m not alone, either. I know without having to meet you that you’ve probably got a similar amount about yourself online right now given the fact we live a lot of our lives online.

Now, how would you feel if all of your personal information – with everything from your relationship status, job and education -, and private messages were taken by a stranger and sold to someone else, making them richer without you knowing about how that data would be used?

This is, in essence, already happening all over the world, to most of us. The data giants in Silicon Valley mine our data, taking advantage of the fact very few of us read the terms and conditions of using their platforms.

Data breach: how companies get rich selling our private information

Our private information is valuable, and it's disheartening to know that big companies can make big bucks off us. How do they do it? And what can we do to combat it?

Want more Netflix content to binge? Check out this series with some of thebest sex scenes, or readour defence of Amy Poehler's joyfully fine Wine Country.

The new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, lays all of these truths out for us by examining the scandal around Cambridge Analytica and is perhaps the most terrifying film on the platform right now because of how we’re all implicated in the conclusions it draws.

You likely only knew of Cambridge Analytica as of 2018 thanks to exposes out of The Guardian and New York Times on how they were using private citizen data. As The Great Hack tells it, the company doubled as a ‘full-service propaganda machine’ for the Leave EU and Trump campaigns in 2016. The company used social media platforms such as Facebook in order to collect data via military techniques in order to successfully target and sway undecided voters. Their work included coming up with such slogans as ‘Lock her up’, and helped both campaigns to victory by weaponising people’s own data against them to manipulate.

Directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim give us a plain look at the scandal as well as some of the key players involved: Professor David Carroll, the man who took Cambridge Analytica in order to get back the data they had on him, Carole Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist at The Guardian who exposed the company, Paul Hilder, a political technologist who also reported on the scandal and Brittany Kaiser, one of the whistle-blower ex-employees who had worked on the ‘Leave EU’ and Trump propaganda campaigns run by the company.

Brittany Kaiser was one of the most important whistleblowers in the case. Image: NetfixSource:Whimn

Kaiser is an especially fraught character in the story. Repeatedly saying she started out working for Obama’s 2008 campaign, and always wanted to help, only to start working for a company that generated fake news. In fact, she also kept information from the filmmakers over the course of filming. After it premiered at Sundance Film Festival, they found out she had met with Julian Assange and visited Russia, forcing them to go back and re-edit the film to account for new information.

The film draws our attention to the fact that while most social platforms were born out of a desire to ‘connect people across the world’, in recent years, they’ve become tools for the far-right who have been using companies like Cambridge Analytica to sway democratic processes. What’s most concerning about this, is that governments (and especially the American government) aren’t working fast enough to keep up with their technological advancements that desperately need to be regulated.

The picture they paint isn’t one you want to spend a lot of time staring at. Because with it comes the realisation that with our embrace of digital forms of communication and ‘connection’ we are freely giving up the details of our lives to these tech giants without knowing how that same information might be used.

Carole Cadwalladra is a journalist who first reported on the data breach. Image: NetflixSource:Whimn

Understandably, people who have been watching The Great Hack have had a similar reaction to mine, saying they were terrified after fully grasping the realities. Many remarked they were going to shut down their Facebook accounts after watching.

One viewer remarked, “You want to see a film scarier than any horror movie that you’ve seen in your life? Watch the great hack in Netflix. I got terrified after."

I'm only 10 minutes into The Great Hack on Netflix and I'm already terrified.

The most terrifying thing about this is how little we actually know. Tech companies are making our lives easier and easier by inventing new technology every day. But when we open our phones and use these apps for convenience – what are we actually giving up?

If there’s anything to take away from watching The Great Hack, it’s that we should be vigilant with how we interact online and that we should probably be reading the ‘terms and conditions’ a lot more closely.